1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of optical character recognition systems and, more particularly, to a method for performing optical character recognition of printed text.
2. Prior Art
A number of optical character recognition (OCR) systems are known in the art. Typically, such systems comprise apparatus for scanning a page of printed text and performing a character recognition process on a bit-mapped image of the text. The characters may then be stored in a file on a computer system for processing by a word processor or the like.
Known OCR systems may be generally divided into two categories. Optical character recognition systems in the first category recognize either a single font or a limited number of fonts and their input is usually restricted to monospaced type of a specific point size. Optical character recognition systems in the second category are typically termed omnifont systems. Such systems are capable of recognizing a large number of typefaces in a wide range of point sizes, either monospaced or proportionally spaced. In general, optical character recognition systems that recognize a plurality of typefaces are not capable of processing documents as quickly as systems that recognize a limited number of specific fonts.
Therefore, an object of the present invention is to develop an optical character recognition method which allows a page of text to be recognized with less errors than are typical of prior art, more quickly and using less system resources.
These and other objects of the present invention will be described in more detail with reference to the Detailed Description of the Present Invention and the accompanying drawing.